Jack was more bored
than hungry. The hub was empty, dark and quiet, the buzz of the
electronic equipment and the occasional hum of the refrigerator were
about all he had to fill the silence since the music had run out
about thirty seconds prior. Somewhere in the distance, if he
listened hard enough, he could hear the needle sliding against the
paper label of the album.

As he dug around the
various take away containers, he found something that looked vaguely
Chinese-y and contemplated how he really ought to flip the record
over, if only to stop the wear and tear the poor thing was already
suffering. The record itself was older than dirt; he only kept it
because the high level of surface noise of the shellac record over
the orchestra was somehow comforting on these long nights when a
chill ran through the hub and the quiet was maddening. The glue
holding the paper label on was dried up and beginning to fail, one of
these nights the scraping needle would sheer it clean off.

Grabbing a fork, he
opened the box, being sure to sniff the contents before walking down
to the main floor of the hub to deal with the record player. No one
packed a lunch here. That was ten extra minutes of sleep in the
morning, which was usually well-needed; their nights tended to be
long and tiring.

Of course, packing a
lunch meant that there was food at home, and if he knew Owen and
Tosh's habits, grocery shopping was very low on the priority list.
Ianto was anal, er, thorough enough to have some sort of schedule, or
pay to have it delivered, and it was just the sort of mundane
domesticity that Gwen would flock towards. But what it left him with
was a refrigerator full of abandoned meals and little else to do
during his alleged 'down time.'

Picking past the
peppers and going straight for the beef, Jack gave an appreciative
grunt. It was strangely good cold. After flipping the phonograph
and starting it going again, he began to wander around with his food,
dodging the peppers as he attacked the cold and coagulated onions and
meat.

Between bites, he
conducted with the tip of his fork, thinking back to a simpler time.
Women were women, men were men and with some fast talking, he could
have them both in his bed by nine. Pressed cotton shirts, well-made
trousers with deep pockets, A-line skirts and soft white blouses, red
lips and red finger tips, dance halls, chocolate bars and ham salad
sandwiches.

And sexism, and racism
and every other ism one could think of. War, truly frightening
additives in the foodstuffs, questionably clean water and even sadder
medical care than these 'more complicated' times.

It wasn't really even
that—every time was different and had its own problems and a
revolving door of both good and bad values. That was something he'd
learned in just a few months of being a Time Agent.

He just missed it.
There'd been something very…home-like about that era, in a
bitter-sweet kind of way. He'd found Estelle one time around, but
had to leave her due to circumstances beyond his control. Another
time, he'd found the crude makings of a family, also abandoned due
to circumstance.

Picking around the box
until all the good stuff was gone, Jack stared up at the shadowy
figure darting around the top of the hub. Even the pterodactyl
didn't want to have anything to do with him tonight. The thing was
like a cat—it only bothered with Jack when it wanted fed.

He spent enough damned
time down here alone that you'd think he'd be over it, but the
nights wore on him whenever he ran out of things to do, or his mind
simply couldn't take the grind any more and shut off from the more
difficult tasks of keeping this place afloat. The day-to-day
operational stuff didn't happen on its own, and it wasn't like he
had the support staff they had in London.

Fucking London. The
Cardiff office was a bit ragtag and they managed to create some of
their own problems, but the London office was a goddamned amateur
hour in comparison. Ok, so Owen had tried seducing people with alien
aftershave. Yvonne Hartman had opened the fucking Rift somewhere
there wasn't even a weak point, had nearly destroyed the world with
both Daleks AND Cybermen, and had killed Rose Tyler.

Comparatively his team
was a bunch of fucking geniuses.

London had gotten too
big for its britches, first of all. They were Torchwood One. They
had been there the longest. This meant they got the funding and the
facilities. And actual windows. They also had the time to build up
the biggest bureaucratic clusterfuck he'd seen this side of The
Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire.

At first, it had been
kind of nice, being so far away from London, and basically being
ignored by them. Sure it wasn't too great for his fiscal
resources, but it saved him paperwork and explaining. He was only
here for the rift, after all, and the Cardiff branch wouldn't exist
without his insistence that the rift be monitored. They'd wanted
him in London and had made him quite a lucrative offer, but he'd
had his heart set on Cardiff. First, he didn't want to run into
the wrong version of the Doctor or Rose, considering how much the
Doctor seemed to hang out in London (vacation homes for Time Lords,
he reasoned), and he had a higher chance for encountering the right
version of the Doctor here, next time the Time Lord stopped for a
fill-up.

And those bastards in
London had just always bothered him. Paperwork, mandatory sexual
harassment seminars, office picnics…

Of course, Gwen might
not have made such a huge mistake on her first day with Torchwood,
had she been through the type of boring but compulsory three week
training class required by the London branch. Safety first, chain of
command, retirement investing, if it's alien it's ours.

No, he didn't demand
that kind of shit from his employees. It was possible having
policies and actual standards could cut out some of the problems they
seemed to have, but His meetings with Yvonne Hartman had always left
him feeling dirty in that special way that made him want to be as
different from London as possible. It was also part of his
subversive nature—they did it that way, they were technically the
lead group, therefore if he COULD get away with running his ship
differently, he would.

Finding another record
to put on, Jack gathered up his mess—used napkin, fork, box of
decimated Chinese and wandered back to the kitchenette for some more
coffee. It had been sitting there since Ianto had left the night
before, and it was liable to be acidic, burnt and slightly rank, but
coffee was coffee, in any case. It gave his hands something to do
while he was wandering around, checking on some of his long-term
experiments. Nothing wrong with a little boredom eating, he
supposed.

All the shit they went
through aside—Jack wouldn't trade the way he did things. What
the hell good had Torchwood One's regulations gotten them? They'd
screwed up far worse than his team ever had. A couple of rift
accidents were nothing compared to Cybermen AND Daleks. That bitch
Yvonne Hartman had fucked over Earth pretty damned good, and the body
count had been far higher than anything that should have been
instigated by an allegedly professional secret organization.

Or, hell, just look at
any of the other retarded projects London had going—like taking
over the long-abandoned UNIT project to drill to the Earth's core.
THAT couldn't end well. The idea sounded ludicrous, and apparently
he was the only one that realised that.

He wasn't proud of
what Suzie had done, or any of the other costly mistakes made by
Torchwood Three, but it hadn't been Cybermen and Daleks. Still—he
had recognised then the dark path they were on the verge of
travelling down, if he didn't do SOMETHING to change the dynamic of
the organisation. One had gotten so full of itself, it had begun
doing things simply because it could. THAT was what the ghost shifts
had been about. And Torchwood One was now fifteen abandoned floors
of an office building with blood smears on the walls.

Is own team…somehow
in their effort to arm and protect Earth, they'd lost sight of the
thing that made up the larger unit of that which they were trying to
protect—people. He still couldn't say they were a customer
service oriented organisation, but at least they tried to do a little
good now and again.

That's what Gwen was
there for. Something to shake things up, knock them out of their 'if
it's alien, it's ours' mentality. It was great for teamwork
that they all pretty much had the same opinions on things, but it was
shit for checks and balances. He'd hated London, the way they did
things, and their constant interference, but they at least had the
occasional outside opinion. Without Torchwood One looking over their
shoulder, they had no one, not even a shitty group with similar
ambitions to make them rethink themselves.

Pulling back the stasis
shielding on a row of plants in various states of growth, Jack
checked heights and water saturations, before putting everything back
as it was. He hadn't gotten it quite right, yet. Growth had been
nearly halted, but it hadn't been stopped completely. He'd have
to keep tweeking.

The truth was—Gwen,
or anyone else for that matter, may have benefited from London's
formal training program. But in Gwen's case, she'd have never
made it that far. A group like that can be as choosy as it wants,
and what does it need with a former police woman with enough
curiosity, decent detecting skills and a genuine interest in people?
They'd have taken one look at her lack of formal education
(everyone at the London office had at least two advanced degrees) and
tossed her resume in the recycling bin.

Of course, look at his
people WITH multiple degrees. Owen had been sent to Cardiff after a
bit of a sexual harassment witch hunt (really, hadn't he watched
the training videos? Didn't he know it wasn't allowed). His
skills were being ignored simply because he was a crass, crude
smartass who couldn't keep his hands out of other people's pants
(Jack could sympathise, he felt he never got a fair shake from the
Time Agency for that reason).

Toshiko, on the other
hand, he'd cherry picked because her skills were being
underutilized. Since she was shy and a tad anti-social, she was
relegated to liaising with UNIT and working with all the data they
managed to pry out of the other group. She'd have never moved up,
due to her lack of field rating. They'd have also never trained
her for fieldwork simply because she had no prior qualifications
(bureaucracy didn't really have a place for people without silly
pieces of paper which said they could do things). Jack managed to
correct the problem with her (and later on with Gwen) in a matter of
a few days, and now she was invaluable and fast-thinking in the
field.

She and Owen weren't
'company men' the way crazy Yvonne preferred, but they were also
capable of accomplishing more, and in a shorter period of time than
their entire counterpart departments 'back home' Despite being
'high maintenance' and occasionally making mistakes London agent
might not have, he wasn't sorry to have them.

Especially since they'd
be dead, if they'd have stayed in London. In light of that, Owen
fucking someone assigned to him as a case project and Toshiko telling
office secrets to a sultry evil alien were things he could clean up
after and deal with.

Besides, due to the way
Torchwood One used to conduct itself, the organisation as a whole was
worst-kept secret in the world. Fortunately he'd thought to tack
on the 'special ops' subtitle to the group when he'd gotten to
Cardiff, otherwise not only would their existence be known, but so
would their true purpose. Throw around a few more words like
internal security and anti-terrorism anything, and people'd let you
into just about anywhere without a question—including that meat
packing plant they'd driven a Krek Beast out of that one time.

Which brought him to
Ianto. Did Ianto hate him? Did Ianto not hate him? Probably
depended on the day, which way the wind was blowing and whether Jack
could resist the urge to slap the younger man's ass or not.

Jack checked the
temperature and pressure gauge on the jar containing his prize
possession. Owen thought it was a demented, macabre fascination with
the hand, and that he should get help. Jack thought Owen should mind
his own business.

It looked like Ianto
was still dusting the bio-jar, even though he'd asked the other man
not to. He didn't want any of the settings bumped or the
preservation mode changed in any sort of way. The hand could be
nothing, or it could be everything. Either way, he wasn't going to
let something happen to it.

Ianto. Ianto was such
a difficult person to get a handle on. There was the 150 IQ, the
obsessive-compulsive neat streak, the way he looked in a suit, the
way he made coffee, and…that other thing.

The thing that probably
made Ianto need therapy even more than Jack did. Not the hiding the
half-cyberised girlfriend in the basement thing, either. In the
proper context, Jack could almost understand that. It was that part
of being a branch director's personal assistant that didn't
involve coffee or sending memos.

In fact, looking at
Ianto's London file, Jack had been equal parts impressed and
frightened with the young man's qualifications and when the
'personal assistant' had asked to transfer to the only other
functional branch (Scotland didn't count—Bob was pushing eighty
and only kept up with the cataloging of all things alien because it
got him away from his nutty wife a few hours a day) after the battle
at Canary Warf.

He supposed it related
to Ianto being a neat freak. Being a Cleaner. Need a body disposed
of? Need to make it look like an accident, or need to just make the
whole thing disappear, as if it had never happened? Call Ianto.
He'll make you a cup of coffee while the bodies are dissolving in a
vat of acid.

According to Yvonne's
personal file of the incident, Ianto had once made a mass murder by
hostile aliens look like a pub fire started by faulty wiring…in
twenty minutes. A hundred and nineteen bodies, disposed of, and
explained, just like that. Another thirty and he had plausible paper
trails on the public record for why all of those unrelated people
were in that pub at that particular time.

True, all Ianto did was
clean up shit, but he was very good at it. You probably also didn't
want to fuck with him—you'd end up dead and your life would be
rewritten to make you look like a junkie or a mob hit man. And you'd
never know it to look at him. It wasn't like his personal
appearance says 'cold hearted bastard,' or he ever, EVER spoke of
his more…specialised activities for Torchwood. Holding all that
inside couldn't be healthy or good.

Yes, Jack had felt
betrayed, but he'd let go of the Lisa thing. But Ianto was screwed
up far worse than he was. He was just an immortal hundred and eighty
four year old former Time Agent and con man who'd been abandoned in
the future, had hitched a ride to the past and was missing two years
of his life. He didn't hold a candle to Ianto, sometimes. Not only
had Mr. Jones been doing Yvonne Hartman's dirty deeds for his
entire tenure at Torchwood, but he'd been through that hellish
battle with the Cybermen and Daleks and had the love of his life
turned into half of a creature.

Upon retrospect, Jack
had decided that it would have been easier on Ianto, had his
girlfriend died, or had been fully converted. It was far crueler to
see his love's face staring back from that mess of metal. It was a
perversion, an echo of life that, on top of everything else, had
probably made Ianto a little nutty. Ok, nuttier than he must have
been before. When it came down to it, Ianto could be a cold
bastard—had to be, to do his job. He'd had some small piece of
his life that had been marginally normal, and it had been fucked up
beyond all recognition. He'd spot the young man, just this once,
the temporary leave of his judgment.

Slapping a Post-it on
the jar, ordering Ianto NOT to dust it, upon pain of firing, Jack
looked down at his mostly empty mug. It was cold and it tasted like
shit. So far he'd been given no indication that the afterlife
existed. If it did, his purgatory was sure to be filled with
half-empty mugs of tepid coffee, tea, hot chocolate, cider and
anything else that should be consumed while hot. He may possibly be
in purgatory now.

Making one last trip to
the kitchenette, Jack sighed. He could put on a new pot, he
supposed, but then Ianto would act put-out when he came in. Making
coffee was not a job for mere mortals. And Ianto's coffee was just
better. Apparently there was some London training module that
included making coffee and faking freak accidents and suicides that
Jack hadn't been privy to. Or it might be a mutant power, like in
the comic books.

Dumping out last
night's grounds, Jack found a filter then grabbed the glass carafe
from the burner. At the sink, he dumped out the leftover coffee and
rinsed before refilling the pot with water. Ianto was due in any
moment, and would save him from himself, of that he had no doubt.

He couldn't even make
coffee in this century.

He'd adapted rather
well, he'd thought. Had managed to have quite a bit of fun in a
few eras that had seemed more like home than his own time, even. But
somehow, in the here and now, he was a marginal personnel manager, a
crappy motivator and all-round shitty boss who couldn't even make a
pot of coffee as well as some kid with a penchant for disposing of
bodies, a mere sixteenth of his age.

Seeing Ianto enter the
hub, he made a show of getting the coffee beans. He knew his
limitations. With the coffee, and with the bossing. One'd think
with his knowledge of the future, and military organizations in
general, he'd suck less, but it wasn't the case. If it were so,
he wouldn't have done everything the exact opposite way of Yvonne
Hartman just for the sake of spite.

What it came down to,
Jack thought as Ianto silently took the bag of beans away from him,
was that they were five people who were incredibly bad at their jobs.
Owen couldn't keep his mouth shut to save his life, Tosh couldn't
speak up to save her life, Gwen was not even the Torchwood type,
Ianto had a bucket full of issues, and Jack wasn't any better—he
was just here to find the Doctor and figure out why he couldn't
die, and if he helped humanity in any sort of way, well, it made him
feel like less of a shitty human being than he knew himself to be.

That being said…so
far his people hadn't ripped a hole into the Void and dumped tin
men and pepper pots on a defenseless world in an ignorant time—yet
(it being a world of infinite possibilities, he knew better than to
ever say never). They were also still alive, where as Torchwood One
was a tundra, empty and frozen at that moment of final devastation.
Not even clever, brilliant Rose Tyler had escaped that. They were
all so very incredibly alive.

Arms folded, he watched
Ianto dump the contents of the grinder into the basket, then turned
around when he heard a snort from the door. "He catch you trying
to make coffee again?"

Jack didn't respond
to the jab. "Good morning, Owen."

In the distance, he
heard Gwen and Tosh. Mostly Gwen—twittering away about what some
starlet had been wearing on an awards show last night. Toshiko was
just doing that smile and nod thing that indicated to him that once
again she had no idea how to respond in a social situation. He
gestured for both of them to come up to the kitchen, if only to save
him from Owen's acerbic pre-coffee repertoire of insults.

Usually it took the
team medic two cups to knock down the incivility to a mild roar.
Another two after that, and he'd fly through the whole stack of
files that Jack would place on his desk in the middle of the night in
just a few hours.

Yeah. From a certain
perspective, they were five people who were incredibly bad at their
jobs—but they were doing London's job with just a handful of
agents, AND the world was still in one piece, therefore, they also
rocked.

They all watched the
stream of coffee coming from the machine, transfixed at the sight of
the dark elixir of life and hangover repellant slowly filled the bulb
shaped pot. Like it held some kind of answers or wisdom.

Though, Jack supposed,
at six thirty in the morning, coffee was the chemical equivalent of
the Oracle of Delphi.

Toshiko breathed in
deeply, the smell of the brew seeming to wake her a bit more. Owen
gestured for it to percolate faster, as if he could make it do so by
will alone. Seeing that Ianto was not amused, Gwen clipped Owen in
the arm with her elbow.

They might be
scraps—leftovers, but the Earth was in good hands with them on the
job. And this morning, he didn't even mean that sarcastically.

And…they were his
team. His family. He wouldn't trade a single one of them for the
world.

THE END

The author would like to thank you for your continued support. Your review has been posted.